The friend of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye that sparked the scandal that drove Park from office was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Choi Soon-sil was convicted of receiving bribes from South Korean conglomerates like Samsung. The chairman of another conglomerate, Lotte Group, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in the same case.

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A court in Wisconsin unsealed a report written by the state’s attorney general on the “John Doe” investigations that targeted conservatives. The report reveals the existence of a third, previously unknown, “John Doe” investigation where Government Accountability Board (GAB) employees collected hundreds of thousands of private emails and chat logs from Wisconsin Republicans. Investigators found these documents on GAB servers in directories labeled “Opposition Research.”

Regardless of what happens next in the CFPB [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] matter, this episode illuminated a crisis of authority pervasive in American politics today. The dysfunction it laid bare tells us that we have forgotten what authority means and are thus no longer capable of identifying where it resides in our political system. The result is a post-political order that delegitimizes conflict and undermines the institutions on which we depend to resolve disagreement and forge compromise in a pluralistic society.

Donna Brazile threw Hillary Clinton under the bus by writing a book claiming that Clinton’s campaign controlled the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 primary election, which meant there was little doubt about the outcome of the primaries.

A Freedom of Information Act request obtained the inspection records for the Whole Woman’s Health chain of abortion clinics in Texas, and the results were ugly:

The documents show a widespread problem of health violations at WWH clinics. Staff failed to properly disinfect and sterilize equipment used on multiple women, and were not properly trained in the sterilization of surgical instruments. In 2011, the Beaumont, Texas, clinic did not have a registered nurse on staff, in contravention of legal requirements.

The lawsuit, filed on July 3 by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.

Today, the administration began to take just that series of steps. In an executive order signed this morning, the president instructed the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Treasury to begin rule-making processes in three areas. They are to allow short-term health coverage to last a full year and be renewable, to enable the expansion of so-called “association health-plans” that let small employers band together to offer coverage, and to allow employers to offer health-reimbursement arrangements to help their employees pay for coverage and care with pre-tax dollars.

The idea in all three cases is to engage in some deregulation of the sort Republicans were hoping to advance by legislation, but in the absence of such action by Congress. Each move would give some of the people who now find themselves with few options in the individual market some more options and at a lower cost. But because these steps are being taken from within the framework of Obamacare and without new legislation, all three moves are also likely to further destabilize the exchanges and complicate the situation of insurers offering coverage in the individual market. It has been unclear all year whether most Republicans, in Congress and in the administration, view such destabilization as a feature or a bug. And that confusion is likely to increase now, as Congress confronts new pressures to act in the coming months.

The IRGC is responsible for numerous terror attacks on American troops over the years and has played a key role in interfering with U.S. operations in Syria. A bipartisan consensus in Congress has already backed such a designation, but key Obama-era holdovers and top national security officials who have the president’s ear are urging him to refrain, according to multiple sources who spoke to the Free Beacon.

Prosecutors were unable to produce a smoking gun demonstrating that New Jersey’s senior senator explicitly promised to do something for his co-defendant, Florida eye doctor Salomon Melgen, in exchange for a gift or campaign contribution.

Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago won’t include a library. The physical documents from Obama’s administration will be stored in facilities near Washington, D.C. A digital archive will be available in the library, although it will be difficult to verify whether digital copies of all of the administration’s documents will have been created and made available.

U.S. officials consider the abduction an unusually bold act in a long-simmering spy game between Washington and Beijing, one recently overshadowed by a newly aggressive Russia. But U.S. officials and China experts say the two countries are engaged in an espionage battle that may be just as fierce, if far less publicized.

Iraq’s central government refuses to negotiate with Iraqi Kurdistan until the latter disavows the result of the referendum where the vast majority of voters supported independence for Kurdistan. The government in Baghdad has cut off international flights to airports in Kurdistan and it has stopped selling U.S. dollars to banks in Kurdistan.

President Donald Trump briskly overruled congressional Republicans and his own treasury secretary Wednesday to cut a deal with Democrats to keep the government operating and raise America’s debt limit. The immediate goal was ensuring money for hurricane relief, but in the process the president brazenly rolled his own party’s leaders.

In deal-making mode, Trump sided with the Democratic leaders — “Chuck and Nancy,” as he amiably referred later to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — as they pushed for the three-month deal, brushing aside the urgings of GOP leaders and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for a much longer extension to the debt limit. Republicans want that longer allowance to avoid having to take another vote on the politically toxic issue before the 2018 congressional elections.

“Increasingly, it appears that the Times has gathered book sale data in a manner which prioritizes liberal-themed books over conservative books and authors,” Regnery President Marji Ross said in a company press release. “The net result has been a bestseller list that has increasingly become less relevant to the Regnery audience, and less reflective of which books are actually selling best in the country, regardless of one’s political persuasion.”

Some Jewish communal leaders suggested both privately to Tablet, and in conversations with board members and staff at the Holocaust Museum, that the Museum’s moral authority had been hijacked for a partisan re-writing of recent history, and alleged that the museum had absolved the Obama administration of any moral or political error in its response to mass atrocities in Syria. At least one of the architects of the Obama administration policy in Syria, former deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, was appointed to the museum’s Memorial Council during the closing days of the Obama administration. The Council also includes Obama NSC alumni Grant Harris and Daniel Benjamin. Other Obama NSC alumni, including Hudson and Anna Cave, have joined the Museum’s staff.